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Aeiou(Y) Together, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

The reader might be forgiven for thinking that the subject of AEIOU(Y) words had been exhausted. There exists, however, at least one aspect of AEIOU(Y) which remains incomplete. There appears to have been no specific search for words in which the 5(6) vowels AEIOU(Y) occur as an unbroken group, in any order.

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 38 Issue 2

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

Smynonyms Or Definitive Palindromes

Word Ways

A definitive palindrome consists of a word or phrase plus its definition (loosely speaking) which together form a palindrome, like Susan Thorpe's diary -- yr. aid (97-186). The ideal case is a pair of synonymic reversals like pat-tap, the first to appear in Word Ways (74-172). Such reversals deserve a palindromic name. I offer "smynonyms" -- SyMmetrical sYNONYMS, or, in anagrams, M synonyms, the M representing symmetry -- M mystery in the palindromes -- I "M" as splendor.

The Eleven Square - Take Two, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

This is the first 11-square I have found by entirely automatic means. It took as long as finding a thousand 10-squares. In finding this square, 200,000 million squares complete in the first four rows had to be discarded, including 84000 squares complete to midway or later in the last row.

A Foul Ghoul Soul Loves Good Blood Food, Richard Lederer, Bob Mckenty, Alexian Gregory

Word Ways

The answer is that each line ends with a word that looks like it rhymes with another word or other words in the poem but when sounded out, they don't. Such words are called eye rhymes, that the viewer of these eye-dentities must focus on the replication of letters that appear in the final syllable in each of two or more words and ignore the placement of stress.

Light Verse For The Logologist, John Newton

Word Ways

A wit told a tale

Where a whale comes ashore,

Being somehow confused by the tide and the fog,

Was bagged by a fisherman,

Secured aft and fore,

And left in the guard of his tail-wagging dog.

Vowel Swap Transposals, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

TRAILS-TRIALS and MANTEL-MENTAL ARE EXAMPLES OF 6-LETTER VOWEL SWAP TRANSPOSALS (VSTs), the 2 vowels swapping places and the 4 consonants remaining in situ. Here, I search for 6-letter VSTs having 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 vowels respectively, all the vowels changing places with other vowels. Previous items on letter swap transposals (WW91038, 91089, 91252) deal solely with swapping 2 letters according to their positions in a word: e.g. 3-6 CANTOR-CARTON and 5-6 ALBION-ALBINO, irrespective of whether the 2 letters are consonants, vowels or one of each.

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

It's A Sonnet (Not Sestina), Mike Keith

Word Ways

Did you know that Shakespeare's 115th sonnet contains a hidden message? When the poem is formatted with the appropriate font and character spacing, as shown below, the underlined letters spell IT'S A SONNET BY W.S. The second sonnet is an anagram of Shakespeare's, and contains its own similarly-arranged message.

Letter Trees, Eric Iverson

Word Ways

On March 13 2005, Will Shortz presented an interesting word puzzle on National Public Radio: rearrange the letters of K + ANALOGIES into a tree, where every path leading downward is a four-letter word. The tree at the left yields saga, sage, sane, sank, sine, sink, silk and silo.

Higher Cardinal Transposals, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

Thirty years ago, my article "Cardinal Transposals" appeared in the November 1975 Word Ways. That article presented transposals for the numbers ONE to TWENTY, and then it tens THIRTY to NINETY (omitting EIGHTY). Since then, no other transposal material has appeared for the cardinal numbers TWENTY ONE and upwards.

Cringe Binge: More Media Bloopers And Ephemera, Don Hauptman

Word Ways

It's time once again for another roundup of typographical errors, linguistic lapses, and other amusing oddities in the news. First, some recently heard broadcast items.

Ventriloquism For Dummies, Dave Morice

Word Ways

The following is a dialog between a Ventriloquist and his Dummy. The Ventriloquist's words are in Roman typeface, and the Dummy's are in Italic.

Games On Nonsymmetic Word Configurations, Jeremiah Farrell

Word Ways

The diagram below depicts a geometric configuration consisting of 16 nodes and 12 lines. Notice that each node is on exactly three lines and each line contains exactly four nodes. The fact that 3x16 = 4x12 = 48 characterizes what mathematicians would call a nonsymmetric configuration or block design of size (16,12). This one is named BRUNES' STAR.

Antarctic Words, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

The Antarctic Dictionary, A Complete Guide to Antarctic English by Bernadette Hince was published by CSIRO Publishing, Australia in 2000. This work has been meticulously researched, with more than 15,000 quotations from about a thousand different sources, giving the reader a unique insight into the language of Antarctica. The world's most isolated continent has spawned some of the most unusual words in the English language. In the space of a mere century, a remarkable vocabulary has evolved to deal with the extraordinary environment and living organisms of the Antarctic. There is even a little humour here and there!

Word Lists With All Starting Letters, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

How large must a word list be in order to have a reasonable chance of including words starting with every letter of the alphabet? Because word starting with X are far less likely to occur than others, this question essentially reduces to the probability that a word list of length n contains one or more x-words. If one draws at random n words from a much larger list in which a fraction p or more x-words, then this probability is equal to 1- (1-p)*n, where p*n is p raised to the nth power.

A Homovocalic Survey, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

A homovocalic (HV) is a word with one or more vowels, in which all the vowels are the same. ANAGRAM is a homovocalic. Originally christened 'vocalic invariants' by Dmitri Borgmann in Language on Vacation (LonV), they have been called monovocalics, sometimes univocalics, in Word Ways.

Unsuspected Presidential Vanities, Jim Puder

Word Ways

Suppose that until recently one traditional (if rather odd) question asked of all newly-elected or newly-seated U.S. presidents at their first press conference was this one: "Had you never entered public life, what do you think would be your chief claim to fame at this time?" (In their logologically-fancied responses that follow, the word "my" is always exogenous).

Slub Glub, Faith W. Eckler

Word Ways

Fun and games in a logological family. From time immemorial we have deliberately mispronounced words. An example of this is the word agenda where we always emphasize the first syllable and use a hard "g." We use this word often as in "What's today's agenda?" In their words, what are the planned activities for today? I have to remember to pronounce the word correctly when I'm in the real world, lest I be thought ignorant.

Animal Crackers

Word Ways

What do the following vertebrates have in common? This is a logological puzzle, no knowledge of zoology required. If you need help, see below.

Wide Alphametics, Mike Keith

Word Ways

An alphametic, as most Word Ways readers are surely aware, is a puzzle like SEND + MORE = MONEY, in which letters are to be replaced with decimal digits to make a valid addition sum. Such puzzles were originally called "cryptarithms" and sometimes just used jumbles of letters rather than words or phrases; the term "alphametic" was introduced by J.A. H. Hunter in the 1950's for cryptarithms which use actual words.

Base Pairs, Eric Iverson

Word Ways

Most people are familiar with the decimal system, in which ten different symbols (0 through 9) are used to represent numbers of any size. Our numbers are written in base 10, as distinct from base 2 which uses only the symbols 0 and 1. In base 2, the base 10 numbers 1 through 7 are rewritten as 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, and 111. In base 16 (the hexadecimal system), used by computer programmers, the six letters A through F are added to the ten digits, resulting in "numbers" like AB9F which is equivalent to 43935 in base 10.

Guggenheim Sentences, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In the word game Guggenheim, one selects five categories (colors, first names, cities, animals, etc.) and five random letters from the alphabet, then attempts to find examples of each category beginning with each letter. In this article, we use 25 different letters (all but X), and try to form parallel sentences, each one using words beginning with the same letter.

Heterogrammatic Eight-Squares, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

Eight-squares exist in overwhelming numbers (a few million million by my guess, and 27 million million by Chris Long's formula), so there are many 'perfect' examples. A 1902 effort by Charles B Stewart had a two-word place name and word with an initial capital: decisive egomania computes impotent sauterne interned Viennese East Eden.

Long Word Weaves, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

Word weaves were introduced by Steven Kahan in the Feb 2005 Word Ways. When the letters in the odd positions of a word appear alphabetized, we say that the word is odd-ascending and when these letters appear reverse alphabetized, we call the word odd-descending; even-ascending and even-descending are defined similarly. A word in which both the odd letters and the even letters are either ascendant or descendent is called a word weave. Here is a selection of such words of nine or more letters; all are to be found somewhere in the OED or Webster 2 except where noted.

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

Answers and solutions to the puzzles and games contained in this issue.

Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

Kickshaws, Dave Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 38 Issue 1

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

New Five-Letter Palindromes, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

In "My New Pals" in the May 2003 Word Ways, Susan Thorpe exhibited a list of 459 five-letter palindromes not recorded in Palindromicon II (Jeff Grant and Dan Tilque, Word Ways Monograph Series 6, 2002). These were found on the Web using the search engine Google.